We did however encounter some slight installation issues. Since the backplate adds a bit of underside thickness to the card, motherboards with a ton of PCI-E capabilities like our ASUS P9X79 WS barely allow it to squeeze between the slot and memory modules. Be very careful when installing since even though it may look properly seated, the card may not be making full contact with the PCI-E slot unless you ensure EVGA’s backplate clears the memory.

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3DMark 11 (DX11)

3DMark 11 is the latest in a long line of synthetic benchmarking programs from the Futuremark Corporation. This is their first foray into the DX11 rendering field and the result is a program that incorporates all of the latest techniques into a stunning display of imagery. Tessellation, depth of field, HDR, OpenCL physics and many others are on display here. In the benchmarks below we have included the results (at default settings) for both the Performance and Extreme presets.

With the core voltage set at 1.095V, we hit 1275MHz (which led to in-game frequencies of about 1330MHz) alongside a GDDR5 clock of 6360MHz. Now, the memory clock was low in this instance simply because anything above that point didn’t seem to net us any higher framerates in games. It could be that the games we were testing don’t benefit from higher bandwidth or the GDDR5’s error correction was stepping in but we’ll continue testing and update this review’s forum thread if we learn anything new.

I can't wait for the non-reference models either with custom PCBs or "complete" circuitry (eg installing the additional phase and VRMs missing from the reference model) that sport effective cooling to start showing up